[In a recent scientific publication published on CAIRN, Sebastien Dupont offers a review of the work Dads in danger? Fathers attack women's rights, Editions of the House of Human Sciences, 2022, p. 252 and his contribution provokes reflection]

It is fashionable today to claim to be a scientist, or even to claim to be the bearer of an alternative science by adopting a "point of view" that one would have sought in some noble cause to defend. What was most often only media confusion when the "word" of each person is reported only to himself, has become a deleterious threat very present in the scientific disciplines themselves. The sciences of the "social" are particularly exposed to it, but they are not the only ones since mathematics, from now on, should be filtered with regard to the "race", the "gender" or the "world" of their developers. As far-fetched as this last proposal may seem to the majority, the equivalent proposal for the sciences of society and culture, it, receives substantial support, including from some of its representatives. This is because the boundary between social science and opinion on society, a boundary which has never been, like any boundary, absolutely watertight, is increasingly being deserted by its "guards", those whose mission in light of the rules in force among scientists is to declare the importation of the product or its producer legitimate.

Certainly, the metaphor is easy but nevertheless very enlightening on what happens in the edition and publication in social sciences. Rules, principles, methods and approaches have gradually been established to validate what is part of the scientific exercise and distinguish it from an opinion, a bias or a mood about any social fact. Social science journals and part of the publishing industry have forced themselves to put the texts they received to the test of peer review. Not without difficulty, moreover, since in this case it was not enough to imitate the procedures of experimental sciences to ensure the quality of the proposal. Evaluation former before avoids the publication of pseudo scientific texts, criticism ex post measures the contribution and relevance of those that have been received. But this requires that everyone plays the game, the same game, that of the contribution of knowledge supported, demonstrated, verified and refutable by new contributions.

It is clear that this is no longer the case for all scientific journals and publishing houses. They are giving up in the face of the rising tide of academic activism, which breaks free from rules and methods, to impose "points of view" on the world, on facts and on science itself. The deconstructionism that it shakes like a rattle poorly conceals a desire to prohibit any truly scientific approach and to replace it with a few dogmas from elsewhere and repeated ad nauseam. The review by Sébastien Dupont of the work of Edouard Leport (published here) leads to a troubling question: how did it come to this? By what blindness did a thesis jury agree to validate it? By what laxity in its procedures did an "academic" publishing house authorize its publication?

Here, we are far from the paradigmatic, desirable and profitable controversy, we are in the ideological manipulation of a militant academicism.